Herd Immunity

Herd immunity is when the percentage of the population has reached a level of immunity where the virus does not have enough of a population pool to infect and therefore can not spread nor mutate. Different diseases have different goalposts when that happens. The more infectious a virus, the smaller the pool of susceptible people needs to continue the uncontrolled spread of the disease. Measles is very contagious, so it takes 95% of the population to be immune to reach herd immunity, while Polio attains that level of immunity at 80%.

Few diseases have reached the level of immunity that prevents spontaneous spread. Smallpox and Polio are prime examples. Herd immunity has NEVER been acquired by the population going that level through having natural immunity, which is when immunity is conferred by having the disease. It has ONLY been through reaching that level by natural disease plus an aggressive vaccination program. It has taken smallpox a couple of hundred years to get there and Polio about 50 years. There are still two countries in which Polio is not eliminated, Pakistan and Nigeria. In Pakistan, it is the Taliban and Al-Queda, while in Nigeria, it is Boko haram who are the anti-vaxxers that prevent those countries from reaching immunity. Some diseases have acquired herd immunity only to lose it because of vaccine resistance, such as measles.

When will we in the USA reach herd immunity with Covid-19? Unfortunately, we still have 30% of our adult population who share the bright bulb thinking of the Taliban, Al-Queda, and Boko haram and refuse vaccination, with no likely end in sight for convincing them that vaccination is safe and necessary to conquer this disease.

You would think that when an ex-president and the current president (who are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum) both have been vaccinated and boosted and strongly encourage vaccination, along with the CDC composed of more than 50,000 scientists, physicians, epidemiologists, lawyers, administrators, etc., at least half of the anti-vaxxers ought to be convincible to get the shot because with 85% of the population vaccinated we would have a shot at herd immunity.   96% of US doctors, 88% of nurses, 92% of pharmacists, 99.5% of Congress, and all Governors, regardless of party affiliation,  are fully vaccinated. Other professions with high vaccination numbers are police officers at 94.4% along with primary education teachers, and government employees. Numerous professional organizations, including the College of Physicians, the Academy of Family Physicians, Pediatricians, Obstetricians, Surgeons and Associations of Hospitals, Nurses, Pharmacists, County and City Health Officials, and many more highly support vaccination. The lower vaccination rates are seen in Packers, Fitness Instructors, Cleaners,  Construction Workers, Food Servers, Chefs, and Taxi Drivers, which ought to make you think twice about going out to eat or joining a gym.

In previous essays, I argue that pattern recognition is a significant contributor to intelligence. When 1453 people die daily in the US from Covid, and 90% of those are unvaccinated, a pattern begins to show itself clearly. It does not take being a rocket scientist to figure it out. If you still cannot recognize that we are dealing with a lethal pandemic that has killed 5,500,000 to date worldwide, you must NOT be noticing the pattern! One hundred years ago, we had a pandemic, but that one killed at least ten times that number of humans. That is one record for which I don’t think we should aim. I understand that you should be able to control what goes into your body, but when you already accept that in dozens of other vaccines and when you take a variety of medicines orally, rectally, or by injection, some of them are potentially lethal. I am pretty sure that you don’t check the constitutionality of all those others. I don’t believe that you know the safety or even how most of them are made. And you do not do your own research either. You don’t even know what is in Chicken McNuggets or hot dogs, yet you eat them. Tylenol and many others have used some of the same tests using fetal cells that are now such a major controversy of religious freedom. You are on very tenuous ground to refuse the most potent weapon we have to fight a lethal pandemic. The risk of death from the vaccine is 0.0019%. You are 526 times more likely to get killed in a car accident and 1000 times more likely to die of Covid if you get it, now even more likely with a more infectious virus. If we continue our ostrich sticking our head in the sand stupidity, we might just catch up to the worldwide record for the Spanish Flu. If you can’t understand that 90% of the unvaccinated die and only 10% of the vaccinated die, you obviously cannot comprehend patterns. Mark Twain said that God created the idiots first. Please do not join them! Get your shot!